Economics Roundtable

After 76 months, we finally got back to the prerecession level of payroll employment.

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Jobs

The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .

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Graph-of-the-Year Candidates

Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?

SCSU Scholars

Noticed while grabbing a quick lunch this Powerline post on the withholding of information about Citigroup's guarantee provided by Treasury. I wanted to note that this has been going on for some time, and I've reported on the similar story of researcher Vern McKinley. While looking at ...

For the fourth quarter in a row, the nation's top economics bloggers have conveyed a steadily deteriorating view of the U.S. economy in responses to a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey released today. ...

I read the new employment report by looking at private sector job creation rather than the top number, because of the noisiness of the temporary Census workers making the top number less reliable. Private sector job creation was up 64,000 in September, and is up 863,000 since its trough ...

Denied the ability to devalue, undercut by sterling and obliged to borrow even more money in order to participate in the Greek bail-out, Irelandâ€™s position has become calamitous: debt and unemployment are rising, prices and incomes ...

It takes me almost all week to get to the bottom of a TMQ, but I persevere because it's almost always with a few observations that get that audible hmmm sound out of me at the laptop. Last week's was no exception.

Over the last several months, 22,741 New Yorkers contacted the cityâ€™s Department of Sanitation and arranged for the pickup of refrigerators, air-conditioners and freezers. In more than 11,000 instances, the machines vanished before ...

Sadly. (h/t: Tyler Cowen.) We had him in St. Cloud for a Winter Institute many years ago -- I think we still have his talk on tape, I should see if we can get it up on YouTube -- and he was as delightful as he is in ...

I read (via Hugh Hewitt) Jennifer Rubin's account of the seemingly pro-Iran advertising of international banking giant HSBC. I spent a little time around the bank's Armenia operation when doing a report on remittances in that country. HSBC there is largely a deposit-collection facility, offering citizens a chance ...